Department of History FALL 2020 Newsletter 2 LETTER FROM THE CHAIR | JOHN OTT Dear Alumni, Friends, Students, Faculty, and Staff, A year ago, as I sat down to write my first newsletter as Chair of the History Department, I waxed enthusiastic on the start of fall term: faculty and students flocking back to campus, the rush of color painting the trees on the Park Blocks, the buzz and anticipation that accompanies a new year. This year is very different. The PSU campus is silent. Learning is happening not in classrooms but at kitchen tables, in bedrooms and home offices—wherever a wifi signal can be found. As was already apparent at the time I was writing my John Ott column for the summer newsletter, department faculty and staff have become increasingly comfortable with new technologies for distance learning, work, and communication. Most of us have in eight short months gone from being completely unfamiliar with Zoom and Google Chat to experiencing ‘Zoom fatigue’ from being on screen for many hours a day. Classes that we may never have dreamed of teaching anywhere but in a classroom, we now offer remotely—‘synchronously’ or ‘asynchronously’ in the current parlance. We are all learning. And we are also discovering that these technologies have certain advantages that face-to- face meetings lack. Our sponsored talks are now viewed by audiences globally rather than locally, and can be recorded and shared for later viewing. We can ‘meet’ with colleagues, friends, and family more readily and more spontaneously than was possible in person. For example, I have been meeting once a month to discuss scholarship in medieval canon law with colleagues based in North America, the UK, and continental Europe. We never did these things pre-COVID, waiting instead to encounter one another at conferences or congresses. Now it seems difficult to imagine not seeing them monthly. As we talk shop, my European colleagues can sip their evening aperitifs while I enjoy my morning espresso drink. Like societies before us who confronted pandemic, a certain amount of creativity has blossomed in the face of the hard reality of doing things in a new way. Yet, the experience of greater social isolation and distance learning is undeniably hard. The emotional and psychological toll is especially heavy, and grows as the virus case-load surges and daylight diminishes. Many of our faculty and students must deal with the added stress of supervising home-schooled children. Our students have confronted personal loss and the loss of jobs, the challenge of relocating, and are carrying the burden of social injustice. Our bandwidth—digital and mental—is at a premium. The History Department is trying to help. Thanks to the extraordinary generosity of the Friends of History, we are disbursing $5,000 in hardship grants this fall. These grants will go directly toward student tuition accounts. We hope to give out another $5,000 in fellowships and awards to meritorious graduates and undergraduates. Faculty speak on the phone with their students to check on their progress; we Zoom regularly; and we direct students to university services and the help they need. We have also continued our sponsored talks and community programming, hosting a talk by Yale Distinguished Professor Alan Mikhail in October on “Columbus the Muslim,” and another in November by Professor Nathan Connolly of Johns Hopkins on historical ‘redlining’ and the racist practices of real estate sales in the U.S. PO Box 751 - Portland, OR 97201 503 725 3917 pdx.edu/history LETTER FROM THE CHAIR | UPDATE FROM THE PACIFIC HISTORICAL REVIEW 3 Even as we focus on the enormous task of teaching, our faculty continue to publish: Chia Yin Hsu and Tom Luckett recently saw to print a new volume on The Cultural Life of Risk and Innovation: Imagining New Markets from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (New York, 2020), the product of the biennial Richard Robinson Business History Workshops. Katy Barber was recognized by the Oregon Historical Society with the Joel Palmer Award for the best article published in the Oregon Historical Quarterly in 2019, “‘We were at our journey’s end’: Settler Sovereignty Formation in Oregon.” In short, and as the faculty updates in this issue suggest, the intellectual life of the department continues ever onward. In that, there is reassurance of continuity with our mission. I hope our alumni and friends will take the opportunity to stay in touch, update us on your doings, and reach out. We may be remote, but the Department is still very much present. John Ott, History Department Chair Update from Pacific Historical Review by Marc Rodriguez It has been quite a year for everyone, and it has been no different in the offices of the Pacific Historical Reviewat PSU’s History Department. Since March 2020, we have been working remotely and this has meant that we had our 2020- 2021 fellows transition into their new jobs and undergo virtual training for the first time. Overall this process has gone quite smoothly. Our fellows for this year are Alexandra Ibarra, a second-year student in the MA program, and Allison Kirkpatrick, an Honors Program and History undergraduate. Both have transitioned quite nicely to the virtual workplace, but the social aspect of working together in the office is hard to accomplish via Zoom or Google Meet. Still, we do our best using the available tools. We were ready for the pandemic in ways that some journals may not have been. Our journal had moved to a cloud-based submission and review system in 2014, and this has made the issues of dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic manageable. Submissions continue to come in at a brisk pace, but revisions, peer review, and book reviews are now taking longer to get back to us. We have had to adjust deadlines as academics from Iowa to Incheon now may have increased family, childcare, and elder care duties as a result of the pandemic. We have found that people are doing the very best they can to keep things moving along for our authors but that reasonable delay is now part of the process. Brenda Frink, our tireless Associate Editor, has prepared our journals for production and typesetting on schedule, working with our partners in California and India, a process that was not impacted by Covid-19 in any real way. PHR authors have so far in 2020 won four prizes for their articles from a number of leading historical societies, which keeps up our rather good track record of publishing prize-winning and important scholarship from PSU for two decades and counting. 4 GRADUATE STUDIES COORDINATOR | BRIAN TURNER From the Desk of the Graduate Studies Coordinator Despite months of worldwide disruption, the last year has brought plenty of good news both to and from the department’s MA program. After two years of planning, Fall 2020 marks the beginning of our new MA program requirements. The most significant change sees the Department offering students two different culminating requirements for the MA. Students may now choose between completing a thesis or an examination. Both tracks remain academically rigorous but allow students to choose the best set of requirements for their own goals. These new program requirements are explained on our brand new History Graduate Program website, a platform which, thanks to Andrea Janda and Jeff Brown, is now much more inviting and intuitive. This past year once again illustrated our students’ outstanding academic capabilities. Among the success stories, Silvie Andrews published her article, “Material Witness: The Seaside Riots of 1962–1964,” in the Oregon Historical Quarterly (Fall 2020). Silvie was also awarded a Donald J. Sterling, Jr. Fellowship from the Oregon Historical Society. Katie Bush and Adam Fitzhugh were recipients of prestigious and highly competitive Oregon Heritage Fellowships. If anyone has news of other publications, awards or Brian Turner presentations, please do let me know. Over the last year, the department has conferred nine MA degrees. Sarah Alderson (Ott), Ashley Bower (Bohling), Jeffrey Braytenbah (Ruoff), Nicole Ann Kindle (Barber), Kevin McCormick (Turner), Samuel Mertz (Johnson), Johanna Katherine Murphy (Schechter), David M. Olsen (Ott), Caitlin Elizabeth Pala (Beyler). A hearty congratulations to one and all! Several Graduate Students were recognized at our most recent Graduation Ceremony (June 2020). Zachary Hamilla won the Best Graduate Seminar Paper Award for “Civil Society and Political Discourse in Seventeenth-Century China”. Halely Blackledge received the award for the Highest Graduate GPA (4.0 across 28 graded HST credits). Sarah Alderson and A.J. Earl were also honored for their Outstanding Service to the Department. The Department also awarded thousands of dollars worth of scholarships and funding. In fall 2019, Adam Fitzhugh received the Joel Palmer Scholarship; Jeffrey Arnsdorf, Jacob Hutchins, Neil Lee, Johanna Murphy, Hannah Reynolds, Liza Schade, and Icarus Smith received awards from our Fulton-Dodds Scholarship and Friends of History Scholarship funds. Over the past year, Stephanie K. Oliver awards, which are granted to students nearing completion of their thesis, were given to Jeffrey Arnsdorf and Jason Ferguson. Among our new admits for fall term, Jordan Hallmark and Alexander Navruzov both received Anne Myers Scholarships. Sarah Harris, likewise a new admit, was awarded the Rose Tucker Fellowship in partnership with the Oregon Historical Society. Alexandra Ibarra is returning to work for the Pacific Historical Review, this time while holding the Caroline P. Stoel Editorial Fellowship. Finally several students also made use of hardship funds offered to offset unexpected difficulties associated with the Covid-19 pandemic. All of these awards and scholarships are made available through the generosity of our donors, to whom we all offer the greatest thanks.